The present invention relates to off-road vehicles and other transportable work machinery of the type having ground engaging stabilizer legs, for example, vehicles of such type used in the logging industry.
Most conventional off-road work vehicles are equipped with one or more pairs of selectively operable stabilizer legs which are normally retracted out of ground engagement during traveling movement of the vehicle but which may be selectively moved into ground engagement when the vehicle is stopped to fix the vehicle body in a stationary work position. Other transportable work machinery may similarly be equipped with stabilizer legs to facilitate in-field use. Most such vehicles and machinery have a relatively specialized function and operation. For example, one conventional off-road vehicle utilized in the logging industry is a mobile truck-mounted crane, commonly referred to as a knuckleboom loader, which is equipped with an elongated boom mounted on a supporting bed portion of the vehicle with a grapple assembly supported at the distal end of the boom for selective lifting and movement of large logs. Typically, the vehicle frame of a knuckleboom loader is equipped with two pairs of stabilizer legs to rigidify the vehicle frame with respect to the adjacent ground when the boom and grapple arrangement is being operated.
One common use of such a knuckleboom loader is to load tree-length or other large logs onto a trailer or truck bed for transportation away from a logging site. In the course of such operations, it is not uncommon for it to be necessary or desirable to cut or trim some logs being loaded. However, because of the singular function of a knuckleboom loader, the loader is not capable of performing any such cutting operations and instead another piece of logging equipment or a manually operated saw must be utilized in such cases or, if not available, the log must be left untrimmed.